It is acknowledged that a purposeful screening for diagnosing a certain disease may have a positive impact on a cumulative health improvement for a certain group within a population. Screening is defined as a systematic application of a test or a suitable investigation for purposes of determination whether a subject in question had acquired a disease while symptoms of such disease are not present.
It has been understood that there is a trade-off between potential integral health improvement for the group within the population, expressed, for example, as a decrease in an integral mortality rate or a decrease in morbidity for said group and a potential damage to the certain group caused by triggering awareness of a fact that a subject from that group may be affected by a disease. Such damage may be related to a psychological anxiety of subjects subjected to screening procedures. Next to this, it is a common approach for many national health management policies that prophylactic screening may only be allowed when expected integral potential health improvement for at least the certain group within the population is greater than expected health hazard due to subjecting said group to screening.
Currently, general practitioners act as a primary filtering stage by trying to ascertain for which patients screening is advantageous and for which patients it is not. This is often done by subjecting a patient to a questionnaire and by making an educated guess regarding a risk factor of the patient under consideration with respect to a certain disease. It will be that although this practice is not yet actual, but in cases when a person desires to be screened for a plurality of diseases, he would first address his general practitioner. A filtering task for finding out whether this person will indeed be helped by such screening, posed before the general practitioner, is almost impossible to accomplish, as he or she has to spend hours interrogating the person in question. Such situation is undesirable, cost ineffective and may be inaccurate due to the fact that it is prone to human judgment errors.